Marketing for Startups – Insights

Updated March 21, 2021 / Growth Marketing / Jaime & Patrick

Startup Marketing to Accelerate Growth

Jaime: We’re talking about marketing for start-ups which is a very unique type of marketing. Specifically, technology companies have brought this out in terms of crafting how companies can accelerate growth. One of my favorite quotes I have always heard was by Albert Einstein, which said “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and five minutes thinking about the solution.” I believe Einstein was saying he believed that the quality of the solution generated is in direct proportion to the ability to identify the problem and solve it.

Patrick: It’s so cool. I love that. I really think that’s a great one that encapsulates how you set the stage for marketing for start-ups. People are ready to jump into tactical execution immediately because either the marketing person understands what the buckets are in the tactical arena or there’s this pressure to move quickly. If Einstein says this…

Lean Marketing Frameworks for Startup Marketing

Patrick: THAT, is a huge part of the philosophy of a startup development of a lean marketing system. People are ready to jump into tactical execution immediately because either the marketing person understands what the buckets are in the tactical arena or there’s this pressure to move quickly. If Einstein says this…

Jaime: Who are we to argue?

Patrick: Yeah! I mean, I’ve made it a policy not to spend time validating Albert’s math. So, if he really put it at the 90% factor of thinking about what you’re doing before you do it, I think it’s important. Now, some of the counters that I hear to this position around prep is that it takes too long, and that you need to move quickly and you need to iterate quickly. I’ve had CEOs badger me about this. What usually happens though is it’s kind of like running a race without shoes, or it’s playing baseball without a mitt or a bat. You can play the game but you’re not going to get the results. And so that’s why it might be really good to say: Where do we start? And my reply to people is usually: We start at the end, in a sense. We want to at least start with the end in sight. You need to know what you’re trying to accomplish, your goals, your company ethos, mission statement. What are the pillars that you stand for? What is the typical landscape for start-up marketing? A new team designed to deliver a new product under conditions of extreme uncertainty. I know you and I both look at it as a laboratory where variables are combined in experiments and they’re carried out to achieve specific goals. Now, that may seem a bit on the sterile side but that’s really what the base, at least to me, is with what you’re facing in terms of the landscape.

Patrick: And, Albert solved problems that didn’t even exist, which is exactly what many startups face. How do you solve unique problems (challenges) around your product, brand, audience, market, and industry? Some important soft skills in the creative section are desperately needed here. But more specifically to the goals and action-items in your path, such as: figure out how to get signals on a minimal viable product (MVP), get your first qualitative leads in the door, acquire your first group of clients, etc. Not just reacting by following the over-simplified and naive how-to marketing sites elixirs of hope.

Jaime: What do we think it comes down to in terms of accelerating that growth for a company or a start-up with a new product? I believe it’s two buckets: insight and acquisition.

The Importance of Perspective Analytics

Patrick: Yeah. I agree. Totally. I fully agree. It has to be insights and acquisition. By putting it in these two broad buckets, it does allow us to simplify things, but at the same time, people have to understand that in these simple buckets are a lot of things that need to be done in order to be effective. But you don’t have to do them over a long period of time. They can be done very quickly. And that’s where the lean marketing system comes in, in a highly iterative process that uses the type of analytics you and I have spoken about for years, which is Perspective Analytics. It’s not a descriptive one that just looks at raw data or even reporting data, or looks at predictive types of things that run through AI and that end of the extreme. It’s more of saying: What have you learned? And how appropriate are those learnings to take action on for the next steps, so that you can continue to iterate and move forward and learn and grow? It’s an up spiraling of knowledge that leads either to your bend in an s-curve or to a pivot altogether. You have to be, I think, in a start-up, unafraid to do either or be faced with either.

Startup Marketing for Actionable Insights

Jaime: You said something key — actionable insights. The end result has to be actionable, You’ll be taking inputs of all the research that’s being conducted to get general insights. The question then becomes, “What can you action?” This, to me, is where the Einstein quote is very relevant. The customer development process: understanding the customers and getting deep insights around them. I think it gets glossed over a lot of times, and people tend to go straight to the tactics. Examples of what I hear: we have to do SEM, don’t forget influencer marketing; we’ll need social media. SEO is a must. Those are all awesome, but you can start in any number of different channels across segments, geos, categories, etc. So, where do you start and focus? How do the dominos get set up to all sequentially fall to get the maximum impact?

Jaime: One of the things we do, that I think helps, is when we put together our growth board, and we start prioritizing all of the ideas we’ve collected from different types of inputs. But the key piece to that is the prioritization of those ideas. Simple scoring like: Is it going to have a high impact? Is it low effort or is it high effort to implement that idea? The holy grail to me is high impact, low effort. And then it becomes all gradients of that to prioritize accordingly.

Patrick: And then you say to yourself “Where does the confidence come from?”

Jaime: Correct. And confidence can come from data points, tests, past history. Are there case studies or research that’s already been conducted? You’re looking for positive (or negative) signals to help prioritize. Your most valuable resources are the human capital as well as the time it takes. Money would be another one.

Patrick: You talked about quality. I thought you were talking about the quality of the insights. I think that quality that you’re alluding to is based on the perspective that you have when you look at that particular data point, report, or analytic platform itself. What is your perspective? What are you trying to learn from that? And what did it actually teach you about what you’re doing either right now or what you need to do next? And that’s where you get to the actionable piece.

Patrick: You can look at the quantity that comes back. Some people will say “Oh, wow. I got a high click-through rate.” I’m like, “Yeah, but are you getting leads from it?” So, you need to have the perspective for each piece of data that you look at, and understand what it really is telling you. And that’s why you and I usually call things perspective analytics. Don’t just look at data. Generation D has a ton of data. They have databases, data stores, data hubs, data lakes. They’re drowning in data. But it’s the perspective you bring to each data source and how it interconnects with the other pieces of your marketing project. Because one thing can inform another. It’s not that you have to look in a silo to understand this piece.

Patrick: And another thing that you highlighted, too, was you talked about growth. And initially, in a start-up, you and I look at growth as trying to grow traffic, interactions, and engagement. You’ld love to get customers along the way, but it’s the early signals that will really help you, if you’re looking at it from that perspective, will help you get a framework, a foundation that you can accelerate growth from. And actually hit the actual target, which is the customers, as opposed to the interim growth pieces, which are around awareness, engagement, and testing, testing, testing.

Scaling a Startup’s Growth

Jaime: I think it’s ultimately keeping your eye on what can potentially scale versus what may not. This becomes part of the prioritization exercise.

Patrick: Right. Because those are part of the assumptions that we’re trying to de-risk. You look at somebody and you say your assumption is that this is not going to grow. You got to that point by looking at tests you’ve done and the data that came back, and your perspective, based on what you know experientially, is that this will not grow by itself. You may have learnings from it, and those learnings may inform something else. And even better, sometimes you may get back to that source and find a new way to use that as a growth accelerator. So, it’s really a time point when you look at something, I think. Can it work for me now? Did it work? And can it work? And if it doesn’t, you need to move on from it. You need to pivot if that course of action isn’t leading to something, as opposed to continue testing it out further. That’s where a lean marketing system helps marketers, if they can stay focused on what is driving movement for themselves or growth.

Jaime: And I think it’s the speed too. You want to be able to deploy lightly and quickly so that you gain early insights that can inform a “go” or “no-go” decision to continue.

Patrick: Yeah. Actionable knowledge. I mean, everybody has knowledge but is the knowledge actionable? And, to your point, in programming, the if-then-else statement. If this, then this, else that. And so, that’s what we’re trying to do, is find a direction forward that is informing us and spiraling up our knowledge, so that we can start to understand the truth about our customers, and their relationship to our products and to our brand.

Jaime: So then, let’s get back to the focus: insight and acquisition. We’ll start with insight because we know this a foundational place to start. Talk to me about insight and how you’re looking at it.

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